The 35 Truths About Marriage

People will tell you it's not as dramatic a change as you'd think. They'll say that if you've lived with your girlfriend, you pretty much know what it's like already. They'll say it's not a big deal. These people are lying to you.

Marriage is a leap of faith. Because you're not just marrying your wife. You're marrying your wife in five years, ten years, forty years. You're marrying her when she loses her job, or goes through a depression, or decides to go back to school to become a website designer, or falls asleep again with the kids while you're downstairs waiting to watch a movie with her on the couch. And the same goes for her, with you. Only more so.

Fuck you" (sincere version).

Obviously, saying it in jest is just dandy. I did it six times just now.

"You're not my mother."

I've said this to my wife a couple of times, and her reaction has always been unfavorable.

"Huh?"

Oh, so you weren't listening to anything she said.

"I mean, we saw your parents just last month, didn't we?"

You hate her parents. You just announced it.

"Come here. Let me give you a hug" (when she's pissed).

Angry women hate being smothered with affection. It's like shooting a bear with a BB gun and then trying to cuddle it. Not that your wife is a bear

The Little Red Riding Hoods

She's the sweetest thing on earth, with the innocence of a kindergarten teacher and also big boobs. He is a salivating feral coyote, visually groping your wife and all other wives from inside his cashmere sweater.

The Unconvincing Gropers

We believe you have a great marriage, okay? Quit molesting each other near the bouncy castle at my kid's fourth-birthday party to prove it. Just come out of the closet already!

The Odd Couple

She's a smokin'-hot extroverted free spirit. He's an overweight nudge. Rock-solid marriage. How did this happen? Two words: giant wang.

The Comfortables

Marriage has awakened in them the desire to nest down, make artichoke dips, play Scrabble in slipper socks, and dress as if life were a flight to Australia—fleeces and sweats, even the occasional neck pillow.

The Ecutive and Her Assistant

His life's mission is to explain to his wife other people's insensitive comments, refill her wineglass when it's empty, not to mention pulling the car around and trying to ensure that nothing upsets her in any way.

The Ventriloquists

The husband has lost his ability to speak for himself. Hotel reservations, parent-teacher conferences, visits to doctors' offices in dire situations: She talks; he stands there mute.

The Siamese Twins

Been together since they were 18. If separated for more than four hours, will show immediate signs of duress, shallow breathing, slurred speech, bad decision-making.

The Rocky IIIs

They bicker openly. Argue viciously. Put each other down. They hate each other and no longer even try to hide it. So much fun at a dinner!

Along the spectrum of types of men, I've always considered myself, let's say, enlightened. Or to put it another way: I have always been kind of a girl. I could talk for hours and hours on the phone, I could make love, attentively, and discuss it afterward. Since being married, I have realized that person was a sham. Every day, I discover I'm a little more stereotypically male. I sometimes do not want to talk. About anything. To anyone. I suddenly want to watch sports all the time. The sex I want to have is of the unemotional, definitely physical persuasion. It's not bad, but marriage will reveal to you that despite your best efforts, you're just like every other bozo with a penis.—Charles Beak

Getting married is like joining an all-consuming new religion. Imagine if your best friend became a Mormon or a Jain. You'd both want to go out for dinner, prove how it's not such a big difference after all, how the commonality of your friendship and your love of the Mets is bigger than believing God delivered messages to Joseph Smith on gold plates that were buried in the ground. And you will have that dinner, drink a couple of beers. It may not dawn on you until weeks or even months later, but eventually it'll occur to you that you're no longer speaking the same language. You'll be kind of amazed at the stuff your single friends spend their time worrying about—she had no idea how to make a perfect old-fashioned! she asked me for dinner, but I have tickets to see a Journey tribute band!—and you'll struggle to remember what it was like not to be married. And you will think: on balance, not as good.

If you're buying champagne, buy the great stuff. If you're buying flowers, don't skimp. If you're throwing a party, throw a big party with friends she loves and great food. And karaoke, if need be. No ambivalence here.

What's not within the range of "normal": actually trying to bang the cleaning lady.

Suddenly sex with your wife will be like sex with someone you don't know. Kissing your wife will literally feel like kissing her in the first moments you ever met, when you were excited to find out that she even existed. There's a real lesson in this. You don't know what's going to happen in marriage, which from the outside would appear to be the absolute most static human state. Because from the inside, marriage is dynamic, challenging, and from one day to the next mis the high and the low in such a cocktail that half the time you can't tell if you're drunk or hungover.

She liked a shirt at J.Crew, but they didn't have it in her size. She couldn't figure out how to download that Marc Maron comedy podcast. She loves peonies, but she can never find them in town. In the past, unless you were in the boyfriend hall of fame, this information would vanish from your head as quickly as it appeared. But with the benefit of coming into contact with this information again and again, you can avail yourself of the chance to put it to good use. You'll download the podcast for her, phone another J.Crew, and put the peonies you found in a vase near the front door.

After a while—say, seven years—it may occur to you that you haven't made any new friends lately. But you're happy, and you love your wife, and what's the big deal? The big deal is that unless you keep evolving, you're going to get depressed. Taciturn, grumbly, lonely, and slightly overweight: Your new friends will become Mr. Bag of Cheez Doodles, Mr. Gin and Tonic, Mr. Trader Joe's Chocolate Doo-Dads with Sea Salt, and Mr. On Demand. You'll start to resent "her" friends. You'll develop odd hobbies—calligraphy, maybe—and behave more or less like a mushroom. That's why.

And the toddler just kneed you in the balls!

Um, never wear those jeans.

We're just watching The Daily Show.

No, I really did want a laptop case for our anniversary.

I only have to listen to you tell that story 437 more times over the next three decades!

The Lubriderm is on my nightstand, if you need it.

I feel fat.

Yay! You got the cork out! Wooo-hooooooooo!

Shut the fuck up!

You're going to think, from time to time, that your wife is crazy. The only reason we don't realize that most people are crazy is that we're not married to most people. But here's the key: Don't tell her she's crazy. Not only that: Stop thinking she's crazy. Treat her irrational feelings as rational, because that's how they feel to her. It's called compassion. And marriage is one of the few ways we ever really learn it.

My wife went to lunch with a group of girlfriends. When she came home, she told me all about it: "We got trashed, and then everyone started talking about how often they have sex with their husbands." I asked her if she'd said anything about us. Well, yeah, she said. An argument ensued. I'll spare you the details, but from my end it boiled down to this: Marriage is different, and if it's going to work, it needs to stay that way. It's the deepest, most complex, most demanding relationship of your life. Some information should be absolutely privileged.—Paul Sogub

You're in a Good Marriage If...

You don't take it personally when she is in a bad mood.

You don't take for granted the thoughtful things your partner does—replacing your toothbrush or asking how the Cubs are doing when she could give a crap about sports.

When you fight, neither one blames the other, and each takes responsibility. (Note: If you act like this, you were created in a lab by Dr. Phil and the woman who wrote_ The Secret_.)

The division of household responsibilities feels fair (regardless of the truth).

You can talk to each other about what turns you on.

You don't feel like you're being compared to other people.

You still have big, openended conversations about the future—"Are we happy at our jobs?"—just like you did when you were falling in love.

I have always had a difficult time with Jessica and Dan. Maybe it's because they're always tan from skiing in the Dolomites. It may have to do with his relationship with his Labradoodle. I think he might be gay with that dog. But when we go out for dinner with them and they seem just as simpatico with each other as they are with the entire world, my wife and I always leave feeling like we have an inferior relationship. That's the problem with black hole-ness: You start to believe that other people have perfect marriages. And I'm pretty sure that if they do, it's only because they're robotic and repressed and gay with their dogs.—Clarkson Schlitz

You're in a Bad Marriage If...

You're so hyperaware of your partner's shortcomings—"How can she think the elliptical counts as real ercise?"—that you fail to notice the good things she does.

You feel like you're constantly being compared to other people.

You disagree in unconstructive ways: with defensiveness, contempt, or superiority.

You avoid conflict altogether.

You find yourself feeling jealous of the attention your spouse pays to her iPhone.

When something big happens in your life, good or bad, the person you want to tell first isn't your spouse.

Not only does your partner not like going down on you, but neither of you can actually say "going down on you." You can't talk openly about sex, and as a result you both feel dissatisfied.

Marriage is about a lot of things, but mainly it's about showing up. Showing your wife that this thing right here—dinner, dessert, bath, and bedtime; going to get a pumpkin, a Christmas tree, a flu shot—is the most important thing going.

On the one hand, it sounds like the death of all that is worth living for. Scheduled sex? What's next? Scheduled smiles? But bear with us: It is easy to fall out of the habit, especially if you have kids. You get busy; you get tired. Suddenly you look up and you haven't been laid in four months. This is not good. Your brain is in danger of absorbing a dangerous idea: I can live without sex. Sex, in addition to feeling good and keeping you from murdering people who annoy you, is good for things like intimacy with your spouse. And scheduling it is a way of making sure that intimacy doesn't get away from you.

There's a good chance you're going to start watching Downton Abbey together. While eating cookie-dough frozen yogurt and swilling Chardonnay. And crying. (Bates, you're too good for this world!) For further explanation of this, see

Simple to say. But if you abide, the kingdom opens at your feet. If you've reached an agreement to explore/ lie/invite the local barista into your relationship, find yourself a good divorce lawyer.

The foot fetishist whose wife refuses to indulge his harmless low-stakes kinks. (In that case, I'd advise him to see a professional—so long as those visits to the professional were safe, discreet, and rare.)

Long-married couples whose otherwise affectionate marriages have been sexless for more years than they care to remember. Here the rule should be: Don't do anything to threaten those marriages' socially monogamous standings.

This isn't technically about when it's okay to cheat. But I believe that the one-off, not-okay infidelity is something that an otherwise strong, healthy couple can survive. People tell me they love their spouses so much that they would do anything for them—walk through fire, give up a kidney—except take them back after an infidelity. Ridiculous.

And about when it's not okay. These circumstances are a lot clearer.

It's not okay to cheat when you've made a monogamous commitment and your partner is doing his or her best to meet many to most of your reasonable sexual needs—i.e., you're getting regularly scheduled vanilla intercourse, milder kinks cheerfully indulged, a pass to watch a little porn and jerk it now and then.

It's not okay to cheat on your spouse because you're horny right now and she happens to have the flu right now.

It's not okay to cheat on your wife because she recently had a baby—you did that with her, don't forget—and she's not feeling it.

Boredom is often a reason people cheat, as is the desire for some variety or a longing for a sexual adventure. But before cheating out of boredom, invite your spouse to go on a sexual adventure with you.—Dan Savage

It will be hard not to become one of those people who can't operate outside their marriage. Who doesn't quite remember who he was before he got married and stopped playing soccer with his friends on Saturday mornings. Who doesn't know how to work the washing machine or what his Social Security number is. Giving up on your old self completely is tempting. Don't do it.

And yes, terrifying. But what's more terrifying: giving yourself over to someone so completely, or never letting go at all?